Crab Outta Luck

by Ellis Quinn

  She’d come back to Fortune in the Bronco, and Cherry’d ridden her bike back to her place, Pris going out in her truck to scoop her up once Cherry’d put on some jeans, then they’d meet up here to embark on their three-women commando mission.

  She half-filled a water glass with some soda and stood staring out at the night beyond the window over the sink, brought out her phone and checked her messages. One from Vance, so she played it, Vance out on the ocean somewhere and saying he’d be home in a couple days. Vance was a strong boy, but she knew him well, and could hear just the edge of homesickness in his voice. In the morning she’d snap a picture of Ripken curled up on the pillow she’d made from his old bedsheets with the sailboats on them and send it. Next message should not have been played, but she thumbed it anyway and listened. Roman. The message he’d left when Marcus Seabolt was here. “Bette, your grandma passing so close to the dissolution of our marriage, you know my argument’s got merit—it’s gonna be best for us both if you do the right thing here, we don’t want lawyers involved now, do we? don’t make this hard . . .” She thumbed it closed, deleted it, growled and tried pushing away thoughts of Roman, but knew if she held out a hand, it would shake right now.

  The front door opened and Pris hollered out a hello.

  “In the kitchen,” she said, sniffling, patting her cheeks and manufacturing an easy look on her face she definitely didn’t feel.

  Pris came around from the hall, bright eyed and smiling—saw right away that Bette wasn’t right.

  “Oh shoot, hon, what’s wrong?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You don’t look it.”

  “Where’s Cherry?”

  “Checking out your garden,” Pris said, studying her. “This ain’t about a boat ride, is it?”

  She shook her head no and Pris came close and Bette went for an embrace. Pris patted her back saying, “Tell me what’s going on.”

  She told her how Roman was coming after her, how she knew he was wrong, but he’d still come anyway and how she didn’t have the fuel for that kind of trip right now.

  “It’s just . . . harassment, you know? Almost like a threat, but he coats it in honey so no one can call him on it. If he hires a lawyer . . .”

  Pris gave her a good squeeze and she didn’t know a hug could feel so good when you needed it so bad. “Then I’m a hire a bigger, badder lawyer, you watch me. In fact, I hope he does go on and do it, it’ll be a pleasure for me watching him see how hard a Whaley hits back. You hear me?” Bette nodded, and Pris said, “Go on and dry your eyes now, we got more work to do, I swear you keeping me busy since you been back, murders and lawyers, I mean what you got for me next?”

  It got Bette chuckling and she was able to let her aunt go and turn to the sink to snatch off some paper towels and dry her eyes and cheeks.

  She said, “Cherry got her jeans on?”

  “Girl’s all ready.”

  The front door opened again and they heard Cherry say in a singsong from the foyer, “Your garden is ah-may-zing.”

  When she came into the kitchen, Bette was composed. “That’s Pearl’s garden, it’s gonna be deadgrass when I get my hands on it.”

  “We’ll get you a green thumb yet,” Pris said.

  Cherry looked good and young and ready for action, great humor on her face coming in and checking out the glory of Fortune. “Wow, your home’s so beautiful—hey, who’s this?”

  Ripken’d come out to investigate the new girl with the sweet voice, padding across the crest of a plump upholstered chair in the kitchen-side sitting room.

  “Oh, careful now, that’s my son’s cat, he got claws on him . . .”

  “Look at you, handsome,” Cherry said, undeterred and deeply authentic, hoisting up Ripken by his underarms, his slinky body hanging as she held the little man eye-to-eye. Bette could hear the purring clear across the island by the sink. “What an amazing little kitty you are,” Cherry said in her soft, clear voice, clutching Ripken to her collar, turning to face Bette and Pris with a childlike joy on her beautiful face, mouth open in a wide smile. Ripken continued to purr, then nosed up under her thick braids, poking at her neck, knocking her glasses askew.

  “I almost find that offensive,” Bette said, watching a new friendship forged in seconds.

  Pris said, “She didn’t even need to coax him with salmon.”

  “I did that one time, Pris. All right, maybe a couple.”

  “Didn’t work.”

  “Not even once.”

  Cherry said to Ripken, “You’re so soft, mister kitty—what’s your name again?”

  * * *

  In the cone of light thrown off by the flood up at the house, the three of them dragged down the aluminum jon boat from the bushes and shoved it onto the beach. Then they each got down with hands on the back and side, heaving and laughing, plowing it through the sand till they heard the water against its thin hull.

  Pris tilted down the outboard saying, “Thing better start after all that.”

  “Imagine we were finished before we even begin,” Cherry said and chuckled.

  Bette said, “What happened to the seats on it?” Last time she’d used the boat (heck, Vance would have been in high school, her and Roman and Vance here for a week one summer) it had two swivel seats sitting up high, like white vinyl office chairs.

  “Rotted off and taken to the dump, my guess,” Pris said.

  “Is this thing water safe?” Cherry said.

  “I was in it not long ago. We toured the whole river,” Bette said, leaving out that it was a little longer than not long ago. “I used it all the time when I lived here—never let me down.” Fingers crossed.

  There was gas in the old shed by the water’s edge, and they filled it up, though there was no telling how old the gas was. It took almost fifteen minutes and Pris and Cherry taking turns holding the flashlight, but she was able to spray-lube all the moving parts, clean out the old gas and add the new, and though she’d brought out an old jump battery, they didn’t even need it. Two pulls on the cord and the old motor chugged to life.

  Cherry seemed eased saying to Pris, “She looks like she knows what she’s doing.”

  Bette showed a proud grin, said, “Yeah, told you—it was my boat when I was young. No need to worry.”

  She got the boat sidled along the jetty and they were all able to step down into it with their lifejackets on.

  “Wait a second,” Pris said, steadying her balance with her arms out, and they all paused to see what was wrong. She checked her watch. “Almost 13,000 now,” she said and Cherry gave her a soft high-five again.

  The Jon boat was almost fifteen feet long, flat and shallow, with two raised humps where the seats used to be bolted. She’d crabbed and fished from it when she was littler, sometimes with her mom, maybe grandma Pearl, but when she was a teen it was mostly solo, going out into the bay for some alone time.

  Now, Bette at the back working the tiller steer and clipped onto the motor’s safety switch, they checked the lights and they all worked: red and greens lit up on the front, the tall stern throwing off white above Bette’s head. They idled out into the Bay, Prissy up front, looking almost regal the way she was rim-lit in green from the starboard light, Cherry in the middle, crouched between the humps, looking nervous huddled into her lifejacket with her hair tied up but swaying in the breeze.

  Voice raised against the cool wind, Bette said, “You get out on the water in California?”

  “No, never,” Cherry said. “Well, yeah, but only on big, big boats, not like this. But I love the Bay.” She was tense but smiling.

  Bette put her at ease, keeping the jon close to shore as they headed north, telling her how to put out trotlines and how you trap crab, memories of filling buckets with her mom right at this spot they were passing, feeling the emotion of that day, the hot sun, her mom smiling, taking those blues home and eating them at lunch time on the picnic table out back, Pearl brushing Bette’s hair while Mom played guitar. It was g
ood to be home. Despite all the bad, maybe where her soul was strongest was where her roots gripped the soil—and she came from the Cove, though she’d left it for a brown-eyed handsome man named Roman.

  “Hey, Pris,” she called out.

  “What, hon?”

  “Now I feel like I’m back, you know?”

  “I know it,” Pris said, turning and showing a warm smile.

  But now beyond Pris’s shoulder she could see a substantial straight-line silhouette against the amaranthine night reflected on the calmer, flatter surface of the river water. They’d just come off the Bay, headed now into the Toppehannock River, getting near where Donovan’s girl lived, but not there yet.

  “That a boat?” Its paler shape emerged in the night against the stark black of the forest shoreline.

  Sure enough, it was a boat; a big one too, a crabber, maybe a charter, an older thirty-five footer, a Bimini top over the flybridge, metal post on the deck with its crabbing auto-dipper draped over the gunwale, empty crab net hanging against the hull.

  It sat on an odd tilted angle, and as they coasted nearer, they could see in the pale colored glare of their forward lights it’d nosed up onto a sandbar near the river’s shore. One side’d nestled into a long, gnarled tangle of silvery driftwood.

  At the same time she read MISS CONNIE painted in a blue script font across its rear end, she also saw another boat on its port side, a lighter one bobbing alongside like it was tied off on it. The realization gave her a wild start like she’d been electrified; scalp and fingers tingling, heart racing . . . Was someone else here?

  “That’s our boat,” Cherry cried out practically with joy, not seeing another boat had tied off to it.

  Then the beam of a flashlight strobed the inside of Miss Connie’s cabin, lighting up fishing junk and tackle boxes and a varnished wood interior.

  Bette got a triple whammy of electric shock.

  Cherry shrieked and clapped both hands over her mouth while Bette fumbled with the shift on the motor, wanting to get it in reverse as their jon boat slipped ever closer to the back of the boat Donovan had loaned Royce—and maybe killed him over.

  “Easy now,” Pris called out, raising up to a crouch, getting ready to put hands on the Miss Connie so they wouldn’t collide.

  The flashlight’s beam snapped their way and Cherry made another cry into her hands—then the light was strobing everywhere, going all over like a nightclub, the flashlight’s bearer scrambling, the loud clunks and squeaks of someone darting out of the cabin, over the boat’s side, hopping onto the smaller boat and untying where it’d been roped off.

  Bette swept the tiller hard toward her, almost laying flat and tugging it to her chin, never finding the shift, the jon still moving forward. But with the tiller swept out now, the nose began to turn away sharply from the Miss Connie just as the other boat’s big burly motor roared up. Pris rode the nose of the jon like a surfer, legs wide but knees close, arms out at her sides, wobbling but knowing if she tried to sit she’d end up in the river or thunking down hard on top of Cherry who shouted, “Careful, Pris!”

  The jon set out in a careening arc; the person-with-the-flashlight’s props churned the water hard and its single outboard growled with high horsepower. The river kicked up, and as the boat took off, its wake began to raise and drop the little jon. Cherry stood to steady Pris and Bette warned her, “Stay down, Cherry!”

  The other boat shot off deeper down the river, but then turned out to port. Bette’s wide arc got the jon nosed out toward the mouth of the river, headed back the way they came and that was where the other boat went now too, going out to the Bay with no lights on at all. But she caught its profile now against the black of the river’s northern shore: a twenty-footer, squat with a single open-air stand-up bridge covered by a short flat canopy, fenders roped all along its sides, the person-with-the-flashlight lit up in dim glare from the dash. A pumpout boat with a big outboard, she was sure of it. The boat shot off into the night, growling and churning the river.

  Cherry was laughing now, the laugh nervous and full of relief. “I thought you were going down for sure, Pris!”

  Pris showboated, wide-legged, arms out, tongue poked out the corner of her mouth, still riding the wake that shook the jon from side-to-side, saying, “I been on this Bay since before you were—”

  But now Pris startled, bigger, choppier wake coming at them from when the pumpout had roared toward the river’s mouth with its throttle open, and Pris began to wobble, sway, and her eyes went a little wide. Bette pushed hard on the tiller, trying to get their nose into the wake but it was too late: Pris went hard to port, leaned weight on her toes and the Jon tilted up to greet her, but when it dropped, her top-heavy weight hurled her over the side with a plunk and a splash while Cherry and Bette cried out.

  The jon came around in a tight loop to find Pris already lurching up the sandbar, salt water spilling out of the arm holes of her dress. She slapped angry hands against her thighs.

  Cherry shouted: “Pris—you okay?”

  Pris shouted to the echoey night: “I just got my hair done!” Then, checking her wrist, “Hey, 13,000 steps.”

  THE NEXT MORNING

  A framed newspaper article hung in Pris’s living room on the narrow wall between the hallway and the fireplace mantle. The first photo, at the top of the article, was a studio shot of Pris with her hair longer (and dryer), collar popped up, chunky jewelry, gauzy light on her smiling face all done up with perfect makeup she hired a woman in Annapolis to do just for the article. One time Pearl looked at the picture and said there was too much smug in it to call it a smile, and why did you rest your cheek on your fist like that? smug was why. Pris said to her mother smug was the point of the article. The second picture showed Pris with hands on hips in the foreground, her new home looming large and historical behind her, lush with gardens, the Bay sparkling behind. The article was from The Chesapeake Cove Echo, a rare color weekend edition, June 7, 1997, and it read:

  Three-hundred-and-twenty-five years ago, upon release from his indentured servitude, a red-headed Irishman from Cork patented fifty acres of land in what’s now Sunderland County, Maryland, and was given supplies and farm tools to begin his new life. The man was Cornelius Whaley, and though incoming Irish were few in the 1670s (most of the indentured coming from England), Cornelius’s grant was given in favor over an English indentured servant, his Catholicism winning out over nationalism. The Englishman was a Murdoch, and though he settled elsewhere in Sunderland, the legend goes the man bore a hearty grudge, swearing to Cornelius he’d get him back for usurping the land he claimed he’d been promised.

  The land to the south of what Cornelius and his wife Bridget called Whaley’s Fortune was owned by our town’s founder, Isaac Crockett. Thousands upon thousands of acres, since Isaac was a good friend of the First Baron of Baltimore. A hundred years later, the plot touching the south of Whaley’s Fortune was bequeathed to Isaac Crockett, Jr.’s, daughter, Iris, the plot of land called Crockett’s Kiss. Iris fell in love with and married a shipbuilder named Michael Murdoch, grandson of the man who’d lost out to Cornelius Whaley. Upon the birth of their first son, Michael renamed the plot of land Murdoch’s Promise. A reminder to the next-door-neighbor Whaleys that the Murdochs wouldn’t forget. Thus began a terrible but brief period in the early 1770s reported locally as the Murdoch-Whaley Feud. And, as the legend goes, it wasn’t the British who burned to the ground the original home and barns at Whaley’s Fortune while they came through Chesapeake Bay for supplies; it was Michael Murdoch.

  But let’s flash forward to the present. Three-hundred-and-twenty-five years later, the story continues with Priscilla “Pris” Whaley. Some of you are quite familiar with this Cove dynamo and have worked alongside her on many committees or maybe just benefitted from one of the many fundraisers she’s organized. A lot of us around the Cove have missed her happy face and smooth charm while she’s gone off to Bethesda and started her own boutique PR firm, but Ms. Whaley is
returning to our fair town. Pris is, of course, a descendant of Cornelius Whaley and grew up in Whaley’s Fortune, where her mother Pearl still lives. A woman of success returning home isn’t going to move in under her mother’s roof, so Ms. Whaley’s bought the property next door: Murdoch’s Promise.

  Now, before you worry that the old Murdoch-Whaley feud might return, those days are gone. There aren’t many Murdochs in Sunderland county these days, and the ones that are most likely don’t care much about those old stories. But as Pris told me, “Those feuding days are long gone, thank heavens,” then with a wink: “But it looks like the Whaleys are ahead by a point.”

  That’s where Bette was now, sitting in a thick comfy chair in the living room of Pris’s three-hundred-and-fifty-year-old home, Pris shrouded in a blanket sitting catty corner in a matching chair, hot mug of tea in her lap, cotton pant legs rolled up to just under her knees, feet in a plastic tub filled with hot water—not too hot, but warm enough to gently steam. Marcus was there, hands on hips, expression showing displeasure. Behind him, visible in the adjoining kitchen, his partner, Jason Mitchum, ate hot stew from a bowl held up near his chin, soup spoon clacking against his teeth before each slurp. Both men’d left their cop hats on side tables; Marcus had just come on shift, and Jason was just about done his overnight.